


On dead tongues and dead futures

by yenside



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alien Culture, Memories, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-04
Updated: 2011-12-04
Packaged: 2017-10-26 21:37:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/288180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yenside/pseuds/yenside
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A shortish, babbling, introspective look inside and outside the (Eleventh) Doctor's head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On dead tongues and dead futures

The Doctor speaks English.

Sometimes he lets his companions think he's speaking Gallifreyan, letting the translation circuits pick up slack, but he's not.

He can't bear to speak a dead language that nobody but he will hear.

He knows English- hanging around that planet long enough of course he'd have to pick it up, he spent a century waiting linear on Earth once, no translation circuits or TARDIS or memories and he was so very lucky he knew it.

Sometimes, though.

It's unweildy. Harsh, unrefined, primitive.

Not nearly enough tenses- nothing to denote where in time you stand, whether what you do is fixed or changeable, and sometimes it irks him to string together "I did this in my personal past but in terms of where we are now it will happen in the future and must happen" when it is three or four words in his native tongue.

But he goes on.

He adapts.

He becomes more human by the day, speaks more like a human, thinks more like a human, so much that sometimes he jolts his brain a few connections out, wears the wrong clothing and says the wrong things and acts wrong and feigns ignorance even to himself, just to distance himself.

Because he is the last Gallifreyan left and sometimes he wants to throw that in people's faces so that he can sit and wallow in the memories of his (dead) people and his (dead) planet and his (dead) children.

It's selfish and petty and cruel but he never said he was a good person.

(He looked into the abyss, 8 cycles of the twin suns after his birth, and he ran at what he saw reflected back at him.)

They don't even know he had children once, a daughter who called him grandfather to make it simpler for humans that she loved (that she loved, she was the one who had loved humans for so long, not he but sometimes he forgets that), that she had children and was happy (before the War came).

They don't know that he's seen River die and that by bringing her to the Towers one day will cause it, fulfil it.

He won't tell them.

(He can't tell them.)

He looks at them, the family out of synch and it makes his hearts ache. If there was one good thing about Gallifrey, at least it was linear. No chance of naming your child after themself, or growing up with your daughter as your friend.

Sometimes he looks at Amy and sees his daughter reflected back at him and for a second everything is unbearably tense and awkward and wrong. But the moments pass, as moments do, and nobody but him notices.

His children are all dead and there will never be any more.

(He does not think of Jenny, warrior and brave and strong, dead so very very young, dead before he got the chance to know her. Dead with the knowledge that he shunned her.)

His planet is dead, his people are dead, his future is dead. All he has left is his box and his humans, short finite lives flickering in and out of his.

He can't see them in his minds eye like he could with his people and sometimes that too feels unbearable, sometimes he looks at River and feels nauseous because he cannot see her mind-space, because when she looks at him she cannot see the flickers of emotions, because when they kiss her mind is alien under his fingers, and he cannot sink into it.

Sometimes they are just so small, and alien. He hates remembering they are not like him. He forces himself to remember, because being jolted by the realisation is not something he enjoys experiencing.

Sometimes he is so mighty and powerful, so high above them, not just a Time Lord but the Time Lord, and Time swirls and warps and wraps itself around him in a billion possible futures, unfixed pasts, maleable presents.

He keeps his humans close because if he is lonely then he is a Lonely God, and a vengeful one. He loves River out of order, he loves Amy and Rory in a different way (English is still so limited, and platonic does not quite fit). He keeps them close and protects them and they protect the universe from him.

Sometimes he needs somebody to stop him, and when he needs them they are always there. He isn't a human, but they fit well enough with him that he still loves them, tiny small-minded aliens they are, and he speaks their language because his is like ashes on his tongue.

He has no future. They are his future.

He loves them. They are wrong.

Two opposing time streams should not exist in one place, let alone in one mind, but it all balances out in the end. He sways from one to the other inside his little blue box but he lives. He loves. He saves people.

Surviving was always the Doctor(Valeyard)'s strongest trait.


End file.
